The present invention relates to a technique of automatically collecting traffic data and performance monitor data on a transmission path in a component device such as a user network interface and a network node interface of an ATM switching equipment.
In an ATM switching equipment for switching and transferring inter-user and inter-network information in the form of cells, each of intra switching equipment component device such as a user network interface (UNI) device and a network node interface (NNI) device, measures traffic data about the number of transmission cells and the number of disposal cells etc on the unit of connection set in the above device or on the unit of eac device, and measures performance monitor data about a bit error rate etc on the unit of each device. It is generally requested that these pieces of measured data be tabulated with a predetermined period, and that a result thereof be outputted and displayed in response to a request from a maintenance man.
Those pieces of traffic data and the performance monitor data have hitherto been temporarily collected within each component device, and fetched, edit-processed, outputted and displayed by software in a central controller with the predetermined period or every time the maintenance man makes the request.
A numerical quantity of the respective component devices such as the user network interfaces and the network node interfaces which are accommodated in the single switching equipment, ranges from several tens to several hundreds of units. It is a comparatively large burden on the software of the central processing unit to fetch the data from all the devices within the 15 period that are used in a normal operation, and there must be a possibility of causing a decline especially in terms of a throughput of a call process executed by the same software. Further, alternatively there might arise a problem in which the data can not fetched out from all the devices within the 15 period.
To obviate this problem, there is a method of separately providing a device for exclusively executing processes of collecting and editing the traffic data and the performance monitor data (which device is hereinafter simply called a data editing terminal) separately from the central controller. In order to input the traffic data and the performance monitor data to the data editing terminal from each component device, however, it is required that a data transferring unit similar to the method of inputting the data to the conventional central controller be newly provided between each component device and the data editing terminal.